The question of rolling release?

[Genes MailLists]

On 01/24/2012 07:13 AM, Josh Boyer wrote:

> 
> How is rawhide not a rolling release?  Or perhaps better asked, what
> about rawhide makes it
> unsuitable for use as a rolling Fedora release?

  Actually it is totally unsuitable for a stable rolling release.

  A rolling release, as most mean it these days, is a stable release -
with testing and development repos (rawhide is just the latter).

  A key point of a rolling release is that it offers a continuous series
of smaller changes rather than 1 big change every 6 -9 months (or 2
years in case of enterprise).

  Once you've installed a rolling release there are no more 'big
annoying upgrades' ... really ideal for servers and brilliant for the
desktop.

  For the enterprise - many may prefer quarterly updates rather than
huge updates every few years.

  Further, for those bigger changes (initd, gnome-shell whatever) - one
only has to deal with a single thing changing - which can easily be
backed out if its a problem (think systemd) - and not the compound
impact of multiple large changes.

  In my view, a rolling release model is the way forward - for foss and
enterprise both.

  It is the standard model for much if not most software devel in the
commercial world - as well as the linux kernel, mozilla, google chrome etc).

  It makes a lot of sense ... and offers a great business opportunity on
the enterprise side as well - switching to a rolling release model for
fedora could be a really huge win.

  imho of course :-

  Fedora suffers an additional problem it seems - not only are there
large changes as part of many releases, but lately some of them
immediately stop being supported until the 'next big release' - which
makes fedora far less reliable and desirable - examples of this are
systemd and pulse audio - there may be others.

  gene - user since RH3.